The Hotel That Inspired the Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson

A few years ago, I spent three nights by myself at an old resort hotel in Maine. The reason I was at this hotel (the name of which I’ll leave unsaid) was fairly complicated. The short story version is that I was helping a friend transport his kids to and from a nearby summer camp. The interesting part of the story, at least to me, was that the hotel was once a grand resort getaway, the kind of place where people spent their summers, taking the waters, getting out of the heat of the city. 

The bones of that original hotel were still evident in the wrap-around porch, the enormous dining room, a sloping lawn dotted here and there with cupolas and shuffle board courts, but everything was a little bit run-down and shabby. The families had been replaced by golfers enticed by the cheap drinks from the bar and the buffet dinners, and I’d say the average age of the clientele was around the three-quarters of a century mark.

I enjoyed my time there despite what was a notable hospital smell in the hallways and bedrooms. I discovered a musty library on the third floor filled with donated books from vacations past. I found an adjacent game room with stacked board games, the most recent of which was probably the original Trivial Pursuit from the 1980s. And did I mention the drinks were cheap? This wasn’t that long ago but mixed drinks were at most about four dollars apiece.

Along with the senior set, there were a few miserable teenagers at the hotel, brought along by parents or grandparents, and the expressions on their faces reminded me of pictures I’d seen of prisoners of war. There were so few young people at the hotel that I did wonder if they’d gravitate toward one another in solidarity. This thought led to an idea for a story. I imagined a hotel like this one, and two teenagers, each brought there against their will for an extended stay. These teens would recognize each other as coming from the same town, although they’d never spoken before. The girl would be a star gymnast and popular and the boy would be a strange loner.

In any other circumstance they would never become friends but these two kids, eventually named Joan and Richard, become not just friends but partners in crime. The library from the real hotel made it into my imagined hotel—the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine—and my two young people use it to meet in secret, have long conversations, and hatch a plot to remove a common enemy.

There’s a moment after coming up with a new idea when I need to decide what length of story that idea will justify. In other words, am I writing a short story, or a novella, or do I have enough story to write an entire book? At first, I didn’t think that Joan’s and Richard’s secret and murderous friendship was quite enough for a full novel, but then I thought of a way to bring two more characters into the tale. 

These characters were familiar to me, already, because they were from my second novel, The Kind Worth Killing. I’d always wanted to return to my detective character, Henry Kimball, and to the antihero from that book, Lily Kintner. I realized that Joan and Richard would continue their relationship long after leaving the Windward Resort and that there was a way in which both Henry and Lily could become part of their story. And that’s when I realised that I was writing a novel, and not just a novel, but a sort of sequel to The Kind Worth Killing.

So I’d like to thank that old resort hotel in Maine for bringing me both Joan and Richard, and for bringing me back to my old friends Henry Kimball and Lily Kintner. As a writer you never know where you are going to get stories from; it’s both the joy and the haphazardness of the profession. Maybe I’ll go back to that hotel someday, maybe to celebrate the release of The Kind Worth Saving. The rooms might be musty but the drinks are cheap.

The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson is out now (Faber, £14.99)

The ingenious sequel to The Kind Worth Killing finds private detective and former teacher Henry Kimball embroiled in a labyrinthine mystery involving the infidelity of one of his ex-pupils' husbands.Two's company, three's fatal. 'Do you remember me?' She asked, after stepping into my office. When private detective and former teacher Henry Kimball is hired to investigate an ex-pupil's cheating husband, he senses all is not quite what it seems, and before he knows it he's gotten far too close to the other woman. As the case gets ever stranger, he turns to the only person he can trust, Lily Kintner, someone with dark secrets of her own.

More information about Peter Swanson and his work can be found on his website. He cn also be found on Twitter @PeterSwanson3, on Instagram @peterswanson and on Facebook.